The Operatic Walt Disney, Delivered by Philip Glass

‘The Perfect American,’ by Philip Glass, at Teatro Real

MADRID — Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel “The Perfect American” is a surreal, meditative, episodic account of the last days of Walt Disney.

It seems at first glance to be an ideal source for an opera by Philip Glass, whose surreal, meditative, episodic explorations of the lives of famous men — always men — have formed the bulk of his prodigious operatic output.

Avoiding the long arm of the Disney Company’s lawyers by using only the most stylized versions of its subject’s famous images, the opera, a pleasure to listen to but dull as drama, had its premiere at the Teatro Real here last week. It has been one of the crowning events of the past year’s globe-trotting celebration of Mr. Glass’s 75th birthday. (He turned 76 on Thursday.)

At the fourth performance on Wednesday, the subtle, moody score, at war between its propulsive and serene impulses, felt more than equal in quality to the festive occasion. While criticisms of Mr. Glass’s music as cookie-cutter have always been misguided, “The Perfect American” finds him in especially unpredictable form, experimenting with sonorities, textures and pacing.

Led by the Glass veteran Dennis Russell Davies with careful attention to both its underlying pulse and its twists of temperament, the opera opens with an ominous, low murmur punctuated by sharp, syncopated percussion snaps. The sound gradually expands through the orchestra and warms into something that, under Mr. Davies, has more gentle swing than the relentless forward motion generally associated with Mr. Glass.

The music often seems devised to trail off, to run out of steam as it expresses Disney’s struggle with the cancer from which he died in 1966 at 65. But there is nothing exhausted about its inventiveness. Simultaneously eclectic and cohesive, the score incorporates strange, fractured brass fanfares out of Janacek’s “Makropulos Case” and lilting, seductive rhythms that feel almost foxtrotty, like a misty echo of the 1930s.

Appropriately, for this birthday year, there is a stentorian, Wagnerian choral setting of “Happy Birthday to You,” directed at Disney within the opera but perhaps also a wink from Mr. Glass.

His version of “The Perfect American” was commissioned during the adventurous impresario Gerard Mortier’s brief stint at the helm of New York City Opera. When Mr. Mortier’s hiring fell through in the fall of 2008, a year before his tenure was officially to begin, he decamped to the Teatro Real.

With him traveled many of his plans for City Opera, including a grand production of Messiaen’s “St. François d’Assise” in 2011; a version of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” directed by Michael Haneke, that opens later this month; and, next season, Charles Wuorinen’s new adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain.”

And, not least, “The Perfect American,” which has been directed by Phelim McDermott, who a few years ago with Julian Crouch created a vibrant version of Mr. Glass’s 1980 masterpiece, “Satyagraha,” that came to the Metropolitan Opera from the English National Opera in London. (“The Perfect American” travels to London in June.)

Mr. Jungk’s novel, originally published in German in 2001, is told from the perspective of Wilhelm Dantine, an Austrian-born Disney animator who, after being curtly fired, stalks his old boss through his final months. Like a more malignant version of the investigator whose inquiries frame the story of “Citizen Kane,” Dantine has sought out Disney’s family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, from Salvador Dalí to Peter Ustinov, reconstructing a bizarre narrative of Disney’s illness and death.

Dantine’s telling advances rumors, some more substantiated than others, that Disney, far from the genial uncle persona he cultivated in public, was a cruel, adulterous alcoholic, as megalomaniacal and racist as he was visionary and inspiring. In his great strengths and great weaknesses, Mr. Jungk implies, he is a potent symbol for 20th-century America.

Archetypal and specific, good and bad, Disney is, in other words, an ideal operatic character. But Mr. Jungk’s tight, strange novel has been transformed into a slack, mild pageant with an alluring soundtrack.

Each inspired turn in the music is countered by Rudy Wurlitzer’s stodgy libretto. The prosy text takes us from Disney’s hometown, Marceline, Mo., to his Bel Air mansion to his hospital bed without ever coming together in a narrative, whether a traditional one or something in the abstract, ritualized mode that Mr. Glass has long favored.

The opera is a score in search of a story. Dantine has gone from narrator to bit player; the tension between him and Disney, Old World and New, has vanished without being replaced by another drama. The book’s most striking set pieces — Disney’s dialogue with an animatronic Abraham Lincoln; the unexpected arrival of a frightening girl in an owl mask — retain their mysterious power onstage but don’t connect to their surroundings.

Matters are not helped by Mr. McDermott’s uncharacteristically vague, inert production, though a disclaimer should be attached to that assessment: a technical malfunction before Wednesday’s performance prevented rigs above the stage from rotating properly. Though the problem was not announced to the audience, it evidently had an impact on some of the projections that form a large part of the production’s visual style.

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Even if the technical side had been running smoothly, the show might well have still proved unsatisfying. Mr. McDermott and the designers Leo Warner and Joseph Pierce adroitly found their way around Disney’s copyright restrictions by settling on a look for the show’s projected animations that is more William Kentridge than Walt Disney. Deliberately rough and sketchy, the projections have the sober effect of Mr. Glass’s music, full of scratches, erasures and humans melting into animals and back again.

But not enough use has been made of Mr. McDermott’s extraordinary Improbable Skills Ensemble, whose puppetry and acrobatics formed the core of his “Satyagraha.” And little attention seems to have been paid to the singers’ interactions, which often feel awkward and unevocative.

The tenor Donald Kaasch powerfully fills out Dantine’s intense lines. But while the baritone Christopher Purves sounds firm, he is far too blandly affable as the misanthropic yet magnetic Disney. Neither he nor the opera’s creators seem to have known what to do with their protagonist, how to make a character who both repels and attracts.

Mr. Jungk’s book offers no pat conclusions, but it arouses emotion in a way that Mr. Glass’s opera, despite its searching, resourceful music, does not. It would be fine if we were to leave “The Perfect American” feeling ambivalent about Disney, but we shouldn’t feel nothing.

“The Perfect American” runs through Wednesday at the Teatro Real in Madrid; www.teatro-real.com.

A version of this review appears in print on February 2, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Operatic Walt Disney, Delivered by Philip Glass. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe